Set up your website for Google Success
Whether you have a website already or about to create one there a few things you need to consider. You may hear of the term Google Ranking or the Google Algorithm has changed but let’s remember, getting ranked on Googles is not instant – it is not the case that you built a website and now it is on Google. It takes time for the internet to crawl information and populate so be patient – remember Rome was not build in a day!
When I design a website and my web developer streamlines the website functionality, we come at it from a two-prong strategy – Human and Digital. In other words what humans read, how they read what they like to read is the human. We like colours, easy to read fonts, pictures to explain things and give us an experience or emotional, even breaks in the content help so we can scan pages. We paint a picture for the audience.
When Google reads a website, it sees code, backlinks, keywords, meta tags – clues to what your website is about. It decides on a series of rational things that fits into its thinking – i.e. the Algorithm.
I always say how to have a great website is to give Google the information it needs (we also want to make our ideal clients happy but that is a different discussion).
So, I would like to give you some tips on how to help Google to the information it needs to find and rank you.
Website Structure
This is going to help Google out, Google needs code and words and links to index your website, so make it easy for Google to do this.
- Only use H1 (header tag) once per page
- Make sure the H1 tag is the page tile (this helps Google understand what the page is about)
- Name your images and add meta tag data, so it knows what the image is (it cannot do much with information like this img863.jpeg) It knows it is an image and a jpeg but that is all.
- Submit your sitemap to Google – a sitemap contains all the important pages that you want the search engine to know about
Your website’s structure is important from a crawling and indexing perspective. It allows Google crawlers to easily find your website and its pages and it can display these pages to an audience who has searched for that information.
To ensure that your website is keyword optimized, here are a few tips:
- Title Tags – Include your target keyword at the start of your posts SEO title tags.
- Meta Description – Write irresistible meta descriptions and add your focus keyword so users know what your page is about and click on it.
- Image Alt Text – Since Google cannot read images, you can add your keywords in the image alt text section to tell what’s the visual about.
- Anchor Text – Google uses anchor text to find out what’s the page about, so you can use your keywords for anchor text when linking your pages.
- Use LSI Keywords – Besides your primary keywords, there are other related terms that people search for and these are called LSI (latent semantic indexing) keywords. If you include these on your website, you’re helping Google figure out what’s the content
- Avoid Keyword Stuffing – Keyword optimization doesn’t mean only including your primary search term over and over again. That’s called keyword stuffing and it’s not a good SEO practice. Not only is bad practice, you may even get penalized by Google for doing this.
- Include Keywords in H2 and H3 – As with H1, I suggest you use header 2 and header 3 and adding keywords to those titles. They should be used in the right order as you move down the website page. This can help with SEO results.
- Add Keyword in URL – Another keyword optimization practice is to include your keyword in the URL of your post. This works well when creating a blog, so consider the title of the blog carefully.
